Iím a Microsoft Visual Studio, C, C++, C# programmer who used Perl at my previous job for a few weeks.

The environment was Strawberry Perl with Eclipse and Epic and the packages were controlled and loaded by someone else in the company to keep everyone on the same set of modules.

I want to continue my ďeducationĒ in Perl so I loaded Strawberry Perl, Eclipse, and Epic on my Windows 7 home computer.

Iím having trouble working with packages and as I ask for advice on line it seems as if a large portion of the community is using Active Perl with its PPM interface, which definitely seems superior to Strawberry Perl.

So, this leads to a lot of question. Iím certainly not tied into using Strawberry Perl, but I am used to working with Eclipse and Epic for editing and debugging code.

Will Eclipse and Epic work with Active Perl also, or do I have to learn another editing and debugging system if I switch?

Is there anything like PPM for Strawberry Perl?

Iíve already written a package to screen scrape web content, my next steps are to set up a database to hold the data and write a GUI to interface to those who will use my software. The data is not complex, but it is relational. What open source data bases would you recommend?

What beginner training videos would you recommend?

The program Iím working on is for the management of your company 401K. I plan to publish all of the source on my personal website and let others download it for their use. I could write this is Visual Studio, but it would not be open source that way. That is why I want to learn Perl and publish the source for the open community. The problem with open source is there is no single standard. (ďThe nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.Ē Andrew Tannenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd edition) I just need a push in the right direction, what standard is the best standard that most of the Perl community uses?

Re: [PapaGeek] Need help getting started in the right direction!
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Iím having trouble working with packages and as I ask for advice on line it seems as if a large portion of the community is using Active Perl with its PPM interface, which definitely seems superior to Strawberry Perl.

I would not agree with that last part. I used ActiveState (and PPM) for years but have switched over to Strawberry and use the cpan utility to install modules. With PPM you're limited to a small subset of the available modules, but with cpan and its brothers you have access to installing any CPAN module.

The most common/popular open source database is mysql and is what I use and recommend.

I've never seen any training videos so I can't give any recommendations.

There are a number of perl GUI frameworks. The only one I've used is Tk but I know that some of the others are better.